Eggcorn Forum

Imagery creation is arguably a central notion to eggcorns, but I was wondering just how little imagery is required…

In the past, we’ve seen imagery fragments.. as in the transformation of “Cappuccino” to “Cup o’ Chino.” Although the imagery aspect to “Chino” remains ill-defined, we could all make sense of “Cup o’”—and that is probably enough for the entire expression to be deemed an eggcorn.

But now I’m wondering just how far we could take the vagueness aspect. I guess I started wondering about this when I saw a recent post about “eggball” (derived from “eightball”). I can certainly conjure a degree of imagery there, but not consistently so.

Moreso than that example, I was thinking about how I once thought that “ampersand” was really “ambersand.” I can’t really say there was any imagery involved except for the fact that both “amber” and “sand” are concrete terms that I was familiar with. Conversely, I initially had no reason to move my understanding of that word toward “amper…” until I either saw the full word in print or heard it carefully enunciated.

I guess this might move us a little into the realm of eye dialect rather than eggcorns. I would even include the concatenation of shorter words to approximately spell out the sounds of a longer word as a gray area. At any rate, it’s got me wondering about the possibilities.